Before reading the articles, I had no idea of what crowdsourcing was. Dictionary.com defines it as "to outsource work to an unspecified group of people, typically by making an appeal to the general public on the internet."
In my opinion, when it comes to online collaboration and crowdsourcing, I feel that many people take the information they read on the Internet for granted and perhaps think everything they read is true. It's especially easier to do this when someone feels the information they are reading is legitimate since content can be presented in a way that appears scholarly and totally valid.
Many of the week's readings made a reference to Wikipedia as being a top platform where millions of users can input information and even edit others' information as well. While this online freedom calls into matters of subjectivity and objectivity, people seem to ignore these ideals and digest whatever information is put in front of them. How much of this information is true? And exactly to what level can we trust it? These are a few questions that pop into my mind when I think about crowdsourcing and serves as one disadvantage to the idea of it.
Chris Wilson brought up an more interesting idea, saying that people aren't really the ones in control when it comes to the handling of online content submitted by Internet users:
"Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. According to researchers in Palo Alto, 1 percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits. The site also deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones." - Wilson.
While cooperating and open-source initiatives are indeed about self-interest in a way, I agree with Nicholas Carr's claim that we overly celebrate the amateur, instead of trusting the professional, because it's easy to believe information if people want to quickly receive an answer without doing serious research. For example, scholarly journals are a perfect means by finding answers or results to particular reseach studies, but I doubt that many people's first initiative is to seek out these journals in order to find information. With Wikipedia.com up and running, the ability to obtain information rather quickly is more convenient than researching in the minds of a lot of people.
All in all, I think crowdsourcing is just another tool for collaboration, as humans have always done. As with forms of propanda, crowdsourcing allows for people to publish content that they think is highly representative of what their discussing. As long as the information is legitimate, I don't see a problem with the sharing of knowledge between people on a platform like Wikipedia. I think problems will only arise when users try to publish completely false information about people or other things.
As long as these websites can get their bots out and monitor it, then everything should be fine.
What you think?
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